“We Want You To Come Over And List Our House”
“So I'm totally convinced that the book is key for anybody — for all the reasons your founders knew.”
That’s according to Bob Sheasby, an agent in Brevard County, Fla., near Cape Canaveral, who got his start in real estate after working through a transaction of his own.
After splitting his time between New York and Miami for many years, Bob decided to invest in a ski property in Colorado, where his brother also lived.
“I decided I wanted to buy some real estate,” Bob says. “I closed on a property from my Manhattan apartment, a one-bedroom apartment, using a lot of FedEx with a bank in Texas, a Realtor in Denver and a condo up in Bale, Colo… And I thought, ‘This is fun. I liked this.’
“But I recognized it as a process, and if you know the steps, you can short circuit the steps or get three done at one time instead of back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. When I closed, they said, ‘You can't do that. We've never done it. It always takes six weeks.’
“I said, ‘I don't want six weeks. I’ve got to get in there and rent it for the season.’ So that was the early bug, just liking real estate.”
At the time, Bob was working in a marketing position, and real estate became his sideline hobby. He eventually snatched up properties in Connecticut, Florida, New Jersey and New York City.
“Lo and behold, here I am now as an older adult in Florida with my wife. And I worked for a consulting firm on data, artificial intelligence and analytics, and all that stuff in health care. And that business came and went. And a friend of mine was also in a similar lifestyle — he had done real estate over the years. And the funny thing was when this company ended, we were like, ‘We both do real estate. Maybe we should get together and become a partnership.’
“So we did. This is right before COVID, by the way. So we had these grand plans. We're going to do this software, and he's a tech guy, so we're going to get the systems and automation, stuff like that. But the funny thing was we were not getting much progress.”
That’s when Bob came across the Authorify book program and decided to approach his partner about joining.
“I went to my partner, and I said, ‘I think we should do these books. This could give us a lot of authority. We're new agents. We don't know what we're doing, and we've done it ourselves.’ Over these years, we had bought and sold a lot of property. We could just say how great we are and brag, but this book would tell you: we do know our stuff. And I remember the quote, he said, ‘We're not publishers.’ It was kind of a funny thing. ‘We're not going to be publishing books.’”
But Bob went ahead and placed an order anyway with both of their pictures and began to distribute them to Expired leads. When COVID hit, his partner dropped out of the business and he ended his membership.
Not long after, he got a call from a woman asking if he could sell her home after she experienced a personal tragedy.
“It turns out, she called me cause she had the book, and I went over there and I knew I dropped it off at her address, but she couldn't quite recall. And then she brought the pile of stuff up and the book was at the top of the pile. I see it there — it's the book right there — and we listed it and it went through during COVID. We finally sold the house and then sold another house. So I actually got two deals out of one book.”
Then at the end of the year, Bob got another call out of the blue.
“A call comes in and says, ‘Hi, are you Bob Sheasby?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ They said, ‘Well, are you in real estate?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ They said, ‘Did you write the book?’ … And I said, ‘Well, yeah.’ She said, ‘Well, we want you to come over and list our house.’
“So we set up an appointment the next day, and I go over there and start with the standard list of questions. ‘Are you interviewing other agents? What's your timing?’ And they kept saying, ‘No, we're not interviewing anybody.’ I said, ‘OK, well, what's your next step?’ They said, ‘We want to sign the listing agreement.’ And I said, ‘OK, well, that's great.’ She goes, ‘Well, you're the guy. You wrote the book on this!’ And they had the book there.”
A year later, Bob wasn’t doing a lot of business, mostly handling referrals and odd listings from his website, so he began to try out different training programs to find something that could boost his business.
“There's thousands of them out there, coaching and lead generation. You want to spend money? They'll take your money. So being a marketing guy — not in social media or digital marketing — I was a traditional network television kind of guy — I had to learn all this social media. Then I remembered I had under my desk this box of books that still have my partner and I in the picture.
“So I'm going through this video stuff I'm going to do, I'm going through the blog that I'm going to do, the content that I get a subscription to push it out through my emails, and that's all working. But my wife goes, ‘Well, how'd you get that listing? When that lady called you?’ And I said, "Well, I guess it was that book I sent out, not thinking much about it. And she goes, ‘And then the ones over up in Merritt Island, you got that one sold.’ And I said, ‘Well, yeah, that was a book, too.’ She said, ‘Well, there's two for two. Why don't you do the books again?’ And I thought, ‘That's why she's my wife.’
“So I dialed up and signed up for Authorify. I was shocked at how much it's improved over those last two years.”
“There's so many pieces of software you can get, so many programs. They overlap in some areas, and they leave gaps in others. … And then your coach tells you something else, and you get all this advice and you can't get it together. So that's where the books have now become a central part of what I call assets. It gives me credentials. It's a marketing tool. It's a physical tool.
Bob recently spoke to a member of our team and shared his success after so much time had passed.
“They said, ‘After a year, that book was still in that house?’ I said, ‘Yes, after a year. And my picture's on the front, and it sells every day it's sitting there. When they're ready, there you go.’ So I'm totally convinced that the book is key for anybody — for all the reasons your founders knew — and made it available to the rest of us.”
Bob says he plans to make the books an integral part of his marketing strategy, and he has a solid plan to ensure he gets results.
“When I send it to somebody, I'm going to put a video of me in an email and a text and say, ‘Hey! Bob here! Hope you got my book. I dropped it off the other day. Hope it helps.’ Click done, send it, so I can leverage that content. The book is the reason. And then it just dawned on me this morning because I had another seminar of what you say after the 10th phone call. And I said, ‘Well, I got a lot of stuff in here. I was just thinking about you because we talked about staging. Why does staging really matter? We'll go to Chapter 11 because it's all in there. So take a look at that. OK, good Tom, take care.’
“So I've got content now that it's all in my hand that I can leverage through the video or emails or anything else I want to do. So it's become like the cornerstone of my content marketing. So I'm excited about it. I think it gives me some peace of mind of the pieces that are all running around spinning and confusing me.
“This kind of became — I wouldn't call it an anchor — it's a touchstone that I now have something physical, and I tend to be physical more than digital. The eBooks are great, but I like to have the book in my hand, and I probably will lean toward giving more physical books than maybe most people will… The physical book, they see. But I have the touchstone now. This is the foundation of my program.”
Bob believes the selling power of the books lies in the fact that they remain in front of people for a long time.
“We have this measure in media called reach and frequency… And we determined that sometimes people couldn't see a commercial for three or more times before they even remembered it, or much less got motivated, or made a decision, ‘I'm going to try that brand or that product.’
“And this — sitting on someone's table or someone gets the book after they've gotten your texts, after they've gotten your email, and maybe after you called and spoke to them — that's four touches.
“When you touch a product — again, market research — you see the ad and you try to sell them on the product before they actually touch the product… It costs you every time they have to see it. That ad costs you money, so you're negative. They haven't bought it yet. Once they buy it, they're going to buy it 20 more times. That's where you get it. So you spend on the trial, you earn profits on the repeat. And this book just keeps for free — repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating the message to them, and so on. I'm convinced it's a good program.”
